From The Campus To The Red House

Images

This week I put away my watercolor brush and made a batch of wheat paste to create this collage with bits and pieces of junk mail. The theme was “hot“.
It’s the first time I try making something in this style, and it was so much fun. I think I’ll try again.

Illustration Friday, week 14: HOT

Usually, I use junk mail to cut out letters, like I did last week. The theme was “umbrella“.

Illustration Friday, week 13: UMBRELLA

The week before that I went digital and tried to make the word “slow” fit into the shape of a snail. I like the idea but unfortunately none of the two is very visible.

Like this:

The journalistic meaning of “scoop” was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this week’s prompt – blame it on having English as a second language (or on following the French presidential campaign?). However there are plenty of ice cream scoops over at Illustration Friday.

Like this:

March is there already! My weeks have been full of sketching and drawing and painting and well, I’m certainly not complaining about that. It looks like I’m spending a lot of time on the Internet too though, since the list of links I want to share with you here is growing and growing. Here are some of the artsy ones:

Something “fishy”. I’m always amazed when I come across the work of artists who can create something simple, beautiful, playful and useful and the same time. I guess there is something in Julia Castano’s work about being able to keep seeing the world through a child’s eyes. And the Artistic Moods blog is a really great place to find other artists that have this talent.

Speaking of seeing the world through a child’s eyes, Juliane is blogging again. Her work is wonderful! I love the way she gives life to the beautiful dolls she makes through her photos.

Something new in my inbox: Eileen, whose creative prompts really helped me get to work back in December, has just started a newsletter in which she shares what inspires her.

Like this:

This week I continued working on drawing perspective. Lately I’d been drawing rooms from the point of view of an observer facing the wall, and this time I wanted the observer to be looking at the angle of the room. It meant switching from one-point to two-point perspective, which I’m so glad I finally did, because it opens up so many new possibilities.

Since the monster under the bed only comes out at night, I also had to start thinking about light and shadows, something that’s on my creative to-do list. Spontaneously I’m drawn to bright colors and in my head this bedroom was full of bright painted furniture, colorful patterns on the bed linen, the wallpaper and the pictures on the wall.

Kristin recommended: “err on the light side, you can always go darker. Using a color opposite on the color wheel is a good way to darken hues.” (which I really need to explore, since I tend to always use black when I need to darken a color).

Conclusion: I definitely want to learn more about color theory. Do you have any tips or resources to recommend?

This is my contribution for Illustration Friday’s promt “tea”. This week, my focus was on planning the whole drawing ahead so I could paint everything on the same layer instead of adding bits and pieces using collage. I do like the collage technique, especially to create some shadows. But I have to be honest: sometimes I just tend to use it just because I’m lazy!

Here is what I did this time:
1. Spend more time than usual drawing the whole thing in pencil, using photos as reference for the perspective.
2. Paint in watercolors
3. Add some lines and texture with color pencils.
4. Use white acrylics to paint the vapor swirls.

Although I am not an active member of the scientific community anymore, I do stand — as a trained physicist and as a simple citizen — with scientists facing attacks from ultra conservative administrations and all kinds of obscurantist forces.

This is why I haven’t drawn this heart full of physics, chemistry, biology and other natural sciences : because I am convinced that giving the humanities extra support is more important now than ever.

Whether they like it or not, the problems that scientists are facing under administrations like Trump’s or with climate change skeptics are not scientific, they are political. In other words, scientists need tools to be able to deal with this reality : just because people know the facts, it doesn’t mean that they will chose to act the way you think they should.

And isn’t this precisely what the humanities are about ?

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Like this:

I first thought of hot air balloons and high mountains, and then I figured I’d rather interpret this week’s theme, “up” as in “standing up against”. Somehow more appropriate these days.

On the technical side, it was a good chance to practice drawing characters in low-angle perspective. I watched some really helpful videos on the topic, like this one or that one.
I’ll have to work on getting the volume right, though! The man is rather flat, don’t you think? I think it looks like he’s just been cut out from a sheet of paper.